7 ms·

A look at inner workings of Joycon and Nintendo Switch

146 points by retSava 9y ago

edpazu 9y ago
The HD Rumble on these things is pretty amazing. It makes games like Super Mario Odyssey and Golf Story a real treat to play.
- dejawu 9y ago
  I've yet to differentiate the "HD" rumble from just normal rumble. It just feels like there are more degrees of being "gentle" vs "strong". Is there a hardware difference between what's in the Joycons and the standard counterweight-on-a-motor?
  - mynameisvlad 9y ago
    If you have 1-2 switch, there's a game in there in which you have to guess the number of balls "in" the joycon. It's a great demo of the HD Rumble feature.
    - CGamesPlay 9y ago
      The balls game was the most stunning example of this to me; I really enjoyed the experience of playing it.
  - djur 9y ago
    In Mario Odyssey, there's a recurring challenge where you use the rumble to find the location of a hidden object. I don't know if it's just a psychological trick based on my perception of movement correlating to stronger vibration, but it genuinely feels like as I move toward the lightly rumbling controller that it not only gets more intense but actually moves under my hand, as if the vibration had moved laterally inside the controller. This story has a developer explaining: https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/1/15499328/tumbleseed-hd-rumble-nintendo-switch https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/1/15499328/tumbleseed-hd-rumb... The gist appears to be that the HD rumble effect allows intensity and speed to be controlled separately. Traditional rumble uses a weighted motor which shakes harder and faster as current increases. I definitely have noticed rumble effects in Mario Odyssey that feel like light, rapid trembles as well as heavy chugging thuds. There's boss fights where the sensation of the rumble actually gives you an idea of how successfully your hits are landing, and it really works. However it works, it's pretty stunning.
  - jldugger 9y ago
    The HD rumble is actually precise enough that you can make sounds with it. I'm told that in mario kart 8 deluxe, if you hold up the joycon to your ear as you collect a coin, the joycon itself makes the classic mario coin sound, albeit quietly.
  - pilif 9y ago
    The difference is comparable to the difference between a traditional vibra Motor in a phone and the Taptic Engine based vibration in iPhone 6s and later, including all the haptic feedback tricks provided by later iOS versions running on these devices
  - NoodleIncident 9y ago
    It basically plays audio files. I've played most of my Odyssey playtime with just the joycons by themselves, no strap or grip, which makes it more noticeable. Top 3 rumbles: 1) The "fizz" when you're swimming in a carbonated sea 2) Rumbling motorbikes in the city and elsewhere 3) The scrabbling feet of a "Jaxi" These aren't the only things with rumble, just the ones that I thought felt most unique. I've also heard that in Mario Kart, the sound of picking up a coin is essentially played by the joycon's rumble, even when the audio is off.
  - thedudepenguin 9y ago
    It is hard to explain, but you really do feel it in Golf Story. There is certainly a difference in a "light" rumble when hitting the ball, vs a "light" rumble when the ball is tapping along a green.
  - minimaxir 9y ago
    There are several Moons in Odyssey which, in traditional Nintendo fashion, make full use of the new system hardware by vibrating the joycons with increasing intensity as you walk around the area until you feel the strongest vibration, which is where the Moon is located.
    - izacus 9y ago
      Is that so much different than what e.g. even older Xbox 360 / PS3 controllers could do? I remember games like Tomb Raider and several others using similar haptic feedback systems.
generj 9y ago
Nothing in the breakdown explains why the Joycons are so expensive at $80. The MEMS accelerometer they use costs $1.88 each when buying 500 at a time. Presumably the other chips are about that much as well. There are a lot of connectors on the PCB, but in bulk they, the case, and the battery should be fairly inexpensive. The entire concept of the Switch as a multiplayer in-couch experience is heavily undermined by the excessive cost of a controller.
- com2kid 9y ago
  To get video game consoles on shelves, the manufacturers ask the stores to sell the physical hardware at much lower margins than normal, in return promising sales of peripherals with a huge markup. Having talked to a few people who were directly involved, for controllers the manufacturer get maybe 10% of the purchase price as profit, the store would take 40%+. The markup was basically 100% from what the distributor charged. This is also why for the longest time consoles shipped with bare bones everything. E.g. External wifi, sometimes extra video cables were even needed. Anything to help the store turn an actual profit on selling the physical consoles.
- 5ilv3r 9y ago
  Looking at this in the other direction, this is giving them quite a bit of profit now with lots of room to lower the price to remain competitive later. Nintendo is just posturing to undercut the next gen releases from sony and ms.
- writeslowly 9y ago
  I'm not sure if any of this is particularly costly, but the teardown on iFixit[1] says that each controller has a Bluetooth transceiver, LRA, flash memory, NFC reader, and the right side has an IR (depth sensing?) camera. It's also a lot of small parts that have to be assembled once you add in additional components like the docking rails and physical controls [1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Teardown/78263#s156436 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Teardown/782...
- simias 9y ago
  Has there been a videogame console which didn't have overpriced peripherals? As far as I can remember additional controllers were always ridiculously overpriced, even back when they were just a plastic case with a bunch of buttons. Let's not even talk about Sony's price gouging with memory cards (all the way back to the PS1). I guess it's a way to make a nice profit from what is effectively a captive audience. You can either buy the original peripherals at extortionate prices or you can try your luck with off-brand copies.
sgspace 9y ago
I am really impressed by how the joycons and the switch itself “just work”. I have never had any syncing issues. You can play the console with the controllers attached to the switch or with the controllers wirelessly and you can change at anytime you are playing the game. I’ve never had any issues with syncing and changing playing style. Attaching/detaching the controllers never takes more than a couple seconds even in the middle of a game.
- jmkni 9y ago
  There was quite a wide spread issue with syncing the JoyCons on launch, particular with the left one - http://m.uk.ign.com/articles/2017/03/22/nintendo-confirms-switch-joy-con-sync-issues-caused-by-manufacturing-error http://m.uk.ign.com/articles/2017/03/22/nintendo-confirms-sw... I haven’t had any issues personally though, I think it’s a great console!
- jontayesp 9y ago
  I’ve had frustrating issues syncing joy-cons. For example, if a game only supports 1-2 players, and my controller is using the player 3 slot, the sync screen will simply ignore any attempt to sync that controller. I can fix this by going to “Change grip order” in setting, but there is no UI indication why I can’t use the controller. It’s just a bit frustrating for a few minutes until I figure it out.
- dkersten 9y ago
  Is this a common issue on other platforms? I’ve basically been using my PS4 controller as you describe (although wired more often than not simply because my setup has the console close enough for it to be convenient) and I’ve never had any issues. It always seem leaky switches between wired and wireless.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    EDIT: "seem leaky" = bad auto correct for "seamlessly"
  - w0m 9y ago
    I think his comment is more that the Joycon syncing is a bit more complicated; as they have ~4 separate modes of operation - Attached, Attached to charging-controller, separate-but-together, and separate. You can get into scenarios where things are 'off', but nothing 10 y/o me wouldn't have figured out quickly I think. It is pretty well done overall; much better than the bottom charging port.
jakebasile 9y ago
All I'm personally hoping for from the Switch modding community is the ability to back up my saves. It is mind boggling to me that I cannot plug a USB drive into my Switch dock and back up saves. I take this for granted on PC but this should be a day 1 feature on any gaming device.
- plandis 9y ago
  Doesn't the Switch provide an SD card input? Can you not save data to that?
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    It does have a microSD, but all game saves go to the internal memory of the console. Even then, the saves are encrypted such that they cannot work on other devices. Citation: http://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/22289/~/data-management-faq http://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a...
dboreham 9y ago
Lack of silk screen doesn't have to be an obfuscation measure : silk screen is an extra process step during PCB manufacture and if you don't need it, omitting the step saves money.
- Posibyte 9y ago
  Exactly. The test points don't need to be numbered either. The CAD tool they use to design the boards can produce a bed-of-nails pattern that can be fed back into QA testing machines. If something fails, they can pinpoint it through the testing facilities and propagate the failures up the chain. At least in my experience with modern manufacturing, unless you have someone doing manual testing with a spring-nail, labelling the test points is completely optional.
  - fiatpandas 9y ago
    Do you know the term for the QA setup/device to test multiple PCBs at once? Or to e.g. write firmware to more then one more at once? What are some search terms for that?
    - rasz 9y ago
      e-testing? usually each board/manufacturing house has its own in house custom solution. btw nice trick for vscored panels to avoid huge number of test points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BDcEqEaKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BDcEqEaKg
      - fiatpandas 9y ago
        Yeah I didn't realize that there would be a lot of one-off in-house methods. Besides board/panel level strategies, I was curious physically what kinds of rigs or harnesses are out there, if there were any industry standard setups. But maybe it's doing smart things at the panel level and building custom testing rigs in house.
    - thesmok 9y ago
crankylinuxuser 9y ago
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain this: "Also, in a bizarre move, Nintendo didn't use the traditional "one side pulled-up other side to ground" way of reading buttons, instead they used a keypad configuration where buttons are arranged in rows and columns. They used the keypad scanner built-in inside the BCM20734 with 128KHz clock for reading the buttons. That means it would be extremely hard to spoof button presses for TAS and twitch-plays. Maybe the Pro controller is different, need to buy one though." Why would a 128KHz polling prevent spoofed button presses? Seems like a NPN transistor could easily spoof that - if TAS players are looking at that. Or am I just missing something how TAS players do it now?
- mikewhy 9y ago
  I didn't think TAS or Twitch Plays used real hardware anyways.
  - Posibyte 9y ago
    Console verification is an important part of ensuring TASes are accurate. For that, we need an interface into the console's controls among other things.
    - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
      Well, given that this controller talks bluetooth, wouldn't a logical way to control the input be to write a BT stack that emulates the controller? I know its not the legit real controller, but buttons are buttons (analog or digital). As long as you don't mod the console itself, that should be fine for the TAS community, no?
      - djur 9y ago
        I'm curious about this too. There's also a physical connection between the joycons and tablet which can be used instead of the Bluetooth. I believe the main issue is that it's very easy to electrically simulate button presses and be confident that the rest of the system is functioning correctly. Once you start simulating the entire controller and its protocol for communicating with the console, you start to enter a realm where it may be possible to trigger inputs that are not physically possible with the actual controller hardware.

146 points by retSava 9y ago

The HD Rumble on these things is pretty amazing. It makes games like Super Mario Odyssey and Golf Story a real treat to play.

dejawu 9y ago
I've yet to differentiate the "HD" rumble from just normal rumble. It just feels like there are more degrees of being "gentle" vs "strong". Is there a hardware difference between what's in the Joycons and the standard counterweight-on-a-motor?
- mynameisvlad 9y ago
  If you have 1-2 switch, there's a game in there in which you have to guess the number of balls "in" the joycon. It's a great demo of the HD Rumble feature.
  - CGamesPlay 9y ago
    The balls game was the most stunning example of this to me; I really enjoyed the experience of playing it.
- djur 9y ago
  In Mario Odyssey, there's a recurring challenge where you use the rumble to find the location of a hidden object. I don't know if it's just a psychological trick based on my perception of movement correlating to stronger vibration, but it genuinely feels like as I move toward the lightly rumbling controller that it not only gets more intense but actually moves under my hand, as if the vibration had moved laterally inside the controller. This story has a developer explaining: https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/1/15499328/tumbleseed-hd-rumble-nintendo-switch https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/1/15499328/tumbleseed-hd-rumb... The gist appears to be that the HD rumble effect allows intensity and speed to be controlled separately. Traditional rumble uses a weighted motor which shakes harder and faster as current increases. I definitely have noticed rumble effects in Mario Odyssey that feel like light, rapid trembles as well as heavy chugging thuds. There's boss fights where the sensation of the rumble actually gives you an idea of how successfully your hits are landing, and it really works. However it works, it's pretty stunning.
- jldugger 9y ago
  The HD rumble is actually precise enough that you can make sounds with it. I'm told that in mario kart 8 deluxe, if you hold up the joycon to your ear as you collect a coin, the joycon itself makes the classic mario coin sound, albeit quietly.
- pilif 9y ago
  The difference is comparable to the difference between a traditional vibra Motor in a phone and the Taptic Engine based vibration in iPhone 6s and later, including all the haptic feedback tricks provided by later iOS versions running on these devices
- NoodleIncident 9y ago
  It basically plays audio files. I've played most of my Odyssey playtime with just the joycons by themselves, no strap or grip, which makes it more noticeable. Top 3 rumbles: 1) The "fizz" when you're swimming in a carbonated sea 2) Rumbling motorbikes in the city and elsewhere 3) The scrabbling feet of a "Jaxi" These aren't the only things with rumble, just the ones that I thought felt most unique. I've also heard that in Mario Kart, the sound of picking up a coin is essentially played by the joycon's rumble, even when the audio is off.
- thedudepenguin 9y ago
  It is hard to explain, but you really do feel it in Golf Story. There is certainly a difference in a "light" rumble when hitting the ball, vs a "light" rumble when the ball is tapping along a green.
- minimaxir 9y ago
  There are several Moons in Odyssey which, in traditional Nintendo fashion, make full use of the new system hardware by vibrating the joycons with increasing intensity as you walk around the area until you feel the strongest vibration, which is where the Moon is located.
  - izacus 9y ago
    Is that so much different than what e.g. even older Xbox 360 / PS3 controllers could do? I remember games like Tomb Raider and several others using similar haptic feedback systems.

generj 9y ago

Nothing in the breakdown explains why the Joycons are so expensive at $80. The MEMS accelerometer they use costs $1.88 each when buying 500 at a time. Presumably the other chips are about that much as well. There are a lot of connectors on the PCB, but in bulk they, the case, and the battery should be fairly inexpensive. The entire concept of the Switch as a multiplayer in-couch experience is heavily undermined by the excessive cost of a controller.

com2kid 9y ago
To get video game consoles on shelves, the manufacturers ask the stores to sell the physical hardware at much lower margins than normal, in return promising sales of peripherals with a huge markup. Having talked to a few people who were directly involved, for controllers the manufacturer get maybe 10% of the purchase price as profit, the store would take 40%+. The markup was basically 100% from what the distributor charged. This is also why for the longest time consoles shipped with bare bones everything. E.g. External wifi, sometimes extra video cables were even needed. Anything to help the store turn an actual profit on selling the physical consoles.
5ilv3r 9y ago
Looking at this in the other direction, this is giving them quite a bit of profit now with lots of room to lower the price to remain competitive later. Nintendo is just posturing to undercut the next gen releases from sony and ms.
writeslowly 9y ago
I'm not sure if any of this is particularly costly, but the teardown on iFixit[1] says that each controller has a Bluetooth transceiver, LRA, flash memory, NFC reader, and the right side has an IR (depth sensing?) camera. It's also a lot of small parts that have to be assembled once you add in additional components like the docking rails and physical controls [1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Teardown/78263#s156436 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Teardown/782...
simias 9y ago
Has there been a videogame console which didn't have overpriced peripherals? As far as I can remember additional controllers were always ridiculously overpriced, even back when they were just a plastic case with a bunch of buttons. Let's not even talk about Sony's price gouging with memory cards (all the way back to the PS1). I guess it's a way to make a nice profit from what is effectively a captive audience. You can either buy the original peripherals at extortionate prices or you can try your luck with off-brand copies.

sgspace 9y ago

I am really impressed by how the joycons and the switch itself “just work”. I have never had any syncing issues. You can play the console with the controllers attached to the switch or with the controllers wirelessly and you can change at anytime you are playing the game. I’ve never had any issues with syncing and changing playing style. Attaching/detaching the controllers never takes more than a couple seconds even in the middle of a game.

jmkni 9y ago
There was quite a wide spread issue with syncing the JoyCons on launch, particular with the left one - http://m.uk.ign.com/articles/2017/03/22/nintendo-confirms-switch-joy-con-sync-issues-caused-by-manufacturing-error http://m.uk.ign.com/articles/2017/03/22/nintendo-confirms-sw... I haven’t had any issues personally though, I think it’s a great console!
jontayesp 9y ago
I’ve had frustrating issues syncing joy-cons. For example, if a game only supports 1-2 players, and my controller is using the player 3 slot, the sync screen will simply ignore any attempt to sync that controller. I can fix this by going to “Change grip order” in setting, but there is no UI indication why I can’t use the controller. It’s just a bit frustrating for a few minutes until I figure it out.
dkersten 9y ago
Is this a common issue on other platforms? I’ve basically been using my PS4 controller as you describe (although wired more often than not simply because my setup has the console close enough for it to be convenient) and I’ve never had any issues. It always seem leaky switches between wired and wireless.
- dkersten 9y ago
  EDIT: "seem leaky" = bad auto correct for "seamlessly"
- w0m 9y ago
  I think his comment is more that the Joycon syncing is a bit more complicated; as they have ~4 separate modes of operation - Attached, Attached to charging-controller, separate-but-together, and separate. You can get into scenarios where things are 'off', but nothing 10 y/o me wouldn't have figured out quickly I think. It is pretty well done overall; much better than the bottom charging port.

jakebasile 9y ago

All I'm personally hoping for from the Switch modding community is the ability to back up my saves. It is mind boggling to me that I cannot plug a USB drive into my Switch dock and back up saves. I take this for granted on PC but this should be a day 1 feature on any gaming device.

plandis 9y ago
Doesn't the Switch provide an SD card input? Can you not save data to that?
- jakebasile 9y ago
  It does have a microSD, but all game saves go to the internal memory of the console. Even then, the saves are encrypted such that they cannot work on other devices. Citation: http://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/22289/~/data-management-faq http://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a...

dboreham 9y ago

Lack of silk screen doesn't have to be an obfuscation measure : silk screen is an extra process step during PCB manufacture and if you don't need it, omitting the step saves money.

Posibyte 9y ago
Exactly. The test points don't need to be numbered either. The CAD tool they use to design the boards can produce a bed-of-nails pattern that can be fed back into QA testing machines. If something fails, they can pinpoint it through the testing facilities and propagate the failures up the chain. At least in my experience with modern manufacturing, unless you have someone doing manual testing with a spring-nail, labelling the test points is completely optional.
- fiatpandas 9y ago
  Do you know the term for the QA setup/device to test multiple PCBs at once? Or to e.g. write firmware to more then one more at once? What are some search terms for that?
  - rasz 9y ago
    e-testing? usually each board/manufacturing house has its own in house custom solution. btw nice trick for vscored panels to avoid huge number of test points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BDcEqEaKg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BDcEqEaKg
    - fiatpandas 9y ago
      Yeah I didn't realize that there would be a lot of one-off in-house methods. Besides board/panel level strategies, I was curious physically what kinds of rigs or harnesses are out there, if there were any industry standard setups. But maybe it's doing smart things at the panel level and building custom testing rigs in house.
  - thesmok 9y ago

crankylinuxuser 9y ago

Maybe someone smarter than me can explain this: "Also, in a bizarre move, Nintendo didn't use the traditional "one side pulled-up other side to ground" way of reading buttons, instead they used a keypad configuration where buttons are arranged in rows and columns. They used the keypad scanner built-in inside the BCM20734 with 128KHz clock for reading the buttons. That means it would be extremely hard to spoof button presses for TAS and twitch-plays. Maybe the Pro controller is different, need to buy one though." Why would a 128KHz polling prevent spoofed button presses? Seems like a NPN transistor could easily spoof that - if TAS players are looking at that. Or am I just missing something how TAS players do it now?

mikewhy 9y ago
I didn't think TAS or Twitch Plays used real hardware anyways.
- Posibyte 9y ago
  Console verification is an important part of ensuring TASes are accurate. For that, we need an interface into the console's controls among other things.
  - crankylinuxuser 9y ago
    Well, given that this controller talks bluetooth, wouldn't a logical way to control the input be to write a BT stack that emulates the controller? I know its not the legit real controller, but buttons are buttons (analog or digital). As long as you don't mod the console itself, that should be fine for the TAS community, no?
    - djur 9y ago
      I'm curious about this too. There's also a physical connection between the joycons and tablet which can be used instead of the Bluetooth. I believe the main issue is that it's very easy to electrically simulate button presses and be confident that the rest of the system is functioning correctly. Once you start simulating the entire controller and its protocol for communicating with the console, you start to enter a realm where it may be possible to trigger inputs that are not physically possible with the actual controller hardware.